Next AI challenge: Computers take on StarCraft

From Chess to Go, board games have been the first frontier of artificial intelligence research for decades. Now, the team at Google’s DeepMind wants to take AI to a whole new level in order to beat the online strategy game, StarCraft II.DeepMind announced its decision to partner with StarCraft’s creator, Blizzard, at a conference in California. The two groups say that they look forward to programming a computer to react to strategic problems in real time.“DeepMind is on a scientific mission to push the boundaries of AI, developing programs that can learn to solve any complex problem without needing to be told how,” wrote DeepMind in a blog post. “Games are the perfect environment in which to do this, allowing us to develop and test smarter, more flexible AI algorithms…